Bitcoin Today (19.12.2018)

After a prolonged downtrend period BTCUSD at last showing some growth. From Monday the price gained about 17%, rising from the $ 3150 to $ 3700.

Now bears have met a strong resistive zone at $ 3700 – $ 4000. A fast breakthrough above this zone would boost up the uptrend, but it looks like such a scenario will need some more fundamental drivers. Milder scenario is the price staying above $ 3500support, this could be a good base for turnaround formation. A breakthrough back below $ 3500 could trigger sell-off in anticipation of the downtrend continuation.

Today forecast

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🔹 Bloomberg and Tether Limited bank accounts

The Bloomberg authorities recently have been given access to the financial statements of Tether Limited, the issuer of stablecoin USDT. Though it is hard to confirm that all USDT tokens are provided with US dollars at the current moment, journalists state that on January 31 this statement was true.

So, on January 31, the company’s accounts in the Puerto Rican Noble Bank was holding a significant amount of $2.2 billion. According to the CoinMarketCap analytical resource, at the same time, there was 2.195 billion USDT in turnover. The data also coincided in September and October 2017, according to representatives of the publication.

Note that Tether Limited managed to open an account with Noble Bank in September 2017, and the company increased its assets from zero to $ 392 million in just one month. During this period,the account of the chief lawyer of Teather and Bitfinex Stuart Hegner also held about $ 60.9 million of user funds at Bank of Montreal. At least this wasmentioned in the report of the auditing firm Friedman LLP, with which Tether subsequently broke off relations.

The Bloomberg report states that cash began to flow into another bank in July 2018. If at the beginning of the month,the account with Noble Bank was $ 1.9 billion, at the end it was $ 210 million.Probably, the money was transferred to Deltec Bank in the Bahamas, which confirmed that Tether had $ 1.831 billion in balance on October 31, 2018.

It is worth adding that the publication managed to match a number of transactions between the Bitfinex and Tether accounts at Noble Bank, which completely coincided with the USD Ttransfers.

Recall that in January, the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CTFC) began to study the activities of Bitfinex and Tether, sending subpoenas to the representatives of both organizations. After that, Tether suspended the issue of USDT tokens for two months.

In November, the US Department of Justice launched its own investigation to check whether bitcoin price manipulation took place at the expense of the USDT issue.